Yeah, we aren't required to perform any more blogging explorations, but in the process of digging deeper into Yochai Benkler and the term 'monad" I found this slide show application site that may be of interest to those who are not yet ready for moving pictures but might have a few stills they'd like to link together for fun. Bebo Slide Show Creator has import links with other major image sharing sites like My Space, Facebook, Flikr. It is yet another way to tell your story. Oh, I was looking a blog Politics for Breakfast when I discovered the slide show creation there. Sounds like a perfect name for one of Kathy's sites, eh?
I started my second viewing of Brightcove on the front page and linked to TV Land and a Mr. T birthday card. (My siblings birthdays were this week). Funny, Mr. T has not aged, in fact he looks younger and slimmer than I recall. Could he be a clone?!? I immediately became Lost in Space. No, really, look here (Warning: Turn sound down). Downside of this site is the videos auto start sometimes. Interesting retro site for those of you born after 1975.
But, getting back to what I THINK is the assignment, I dug deeper into the partners of Brightcove, namely the INTERACTIVE AGENCY list. Are these the people behind the curtain? (I see from looking at YouTube this is an overused reference).
First I looked at Interactive Agency/PodDesigns/A&E TV/www.crackthecase.co.uk/. Pet peeve: sound on PodDesign page was not adjustable that I could find. Book promoted on site looks interesting, Convergence Design, iTV, wireless and broadband by Steve Curran. Actually, it looks like the site author, owner and business may only be Steve Curran. No other persons mentioned, though it says "we". Mouse in pocket, Steve or hubris royal we syndrome?
Curran's www.crackthecase.co.uk is a flash product divided into 5 sequentially launched interactive videos. In each part, you begin to solve the mystery (presumably tied to tv show) by wandering through the product. A video launched the beginning, but the rest is more static in delivery. This product remind me of some early mystery/clue video games back in the mid 1990's as well as the original Encarta maze educational component. My mind began to wander into opportunities of using this methodology as post lecture/workshop follow up mechanism for further instruction in an educational setting. I returned to the agency list and found...
AKQA.com, which has more principals, just dripping with V.I.P. associations. Read the back story on the Wayne Rooney Cola viral delivery of the "backlot" film. It was a "leaked" video, initially distributed by one of the film crew to friends, ultimately ending up on YouTube and other places. I suspect it had more impact being "discovered" rather than promoted and saved big bucks in marketing costs. Shades of William Gibson's Pattern Recognition scenario...
I looked at DISTRIBUTION PARTNERS and found blinx a video search engine.
crawled up the
water spout)
So, I found many uses and combined uses of video.
slate commentary on youtube
get the market edge with Flash,eh?
(Okay, so I am a complete ditz and A-didn't realize there was a course website...where was I? And B-didn't catch that we had 3 articles to read and comment on....Was I asleep? Guess I expect too much out of the printed syllabus) So, I thought we were supposed to review Brightcove, which review without introduction equals WRONG DIRECTION! English is my first language, really...
Boy! First I will say that it is "totally" distracting to go to a video site with the intention of doing anything other than watch videos. First impression of Brightcove was to be "aghast" at the "most popular choices" by Americans. (Say, can I leave the country now?) So I started to look at submission source sites. Went to iFilm, another Video display site. They had several additional categories, like for Mac/PC. Interesting. (Justin in our other class brought Mac/PC vids up and I guess the topic stuck in my brain.)
Get a Mac UK - Office
Posted Jan 30, 2007Apple gives a delightful injection of British humor to the U.K. Get a Mac campaign.
The two sites were fairly indistinguishable.
I decided to go back to the first question, use of Windows Media on sites. I searched "who uses windows media streaming". www.tvworldwide.com used it for the streaming media east conference archives, however I noted their home page ran flash. Riding the Global webcasting wave, TV World is offers narrow niche broadcasting. There is one site here to teach you how to draw http://www.discoverartwithsandra.com/. Just think, you can get this training over the web, rather than spending 4 years in art school! Sandra gives you the option of buying her dvd's or signing up for a 6 month program to watch them online.Many of TVWorld channels have an auto playing video, which is annoying. I found this business model repeated in www.playstream.com, listing some of their customers who were also offering subscription or purchase of lessons to either be videos streamed to your computer or dvds. Not particularly stunning.
Of more enjoyment was CBC radio, easy to use and I listened to Vancouvers channel for a while. It broadcast over Windows Media without making me open my media box, having opened it small in my window. Sort of locked up briefly when I went to close it.
Getting further off track: John Hopkins uses streaming video for a number of educational purposes, such as for the 24/7 research channel. I hit webcast and stumbled into a broadcast on Northwest ebusiness, Good Software Goes Bad (from UW business school). The quality was excellent, though small. There is a video on demand option, under where to watch/viewing information.
Littleton uses Windows Media (Colorado) This one did not work for me.
Albuquerque, New Mexico has their city council meetings online
You could find out what the deers vision is, by subscribing here....then you can learn how to kill bambi (wow, sick).This here is a video tour of how logs are milled to get you some wood veneer to work with. I lacked the necessary windows media audio codec and so had to watch it with quick time. The site offered both types.
I am sure there are a whole lot of other sites using Windows media, I probably should have searched under technorati rather than yahoo. However, if we go back to the Mac versus PC commercials, all of these sites would definitely fall under the "PC" definition of customer (I even ended up with Rush Limbaugh's site, but could not bring myself to sign in in order to access!). Yipes!
P.S. I have a PC. (Methinks I should rethink this....)
The ACCESS project is almost scary. It was created to call attention to surveillance. It is an interactive, international social experiment created by a German art/media institute. it has the lighting effect we saw in the Third Man.
As one of the archive videos tells us, ACCESS is an robotic spotlight with tight beam accoustic instructional audio installed in a public place. Individuals are tracked without knowledge of who is the tracker or what is the reason. A voice tells them they are being watched online and gives them instructions, with mixed results.[see the project archives;ARS Electronica 2003. ] then watch:
Quick Time is the delivery method, the videos are archived in a very clean, minimalist style. They are of short duration, most load very quickly in a new window. The image quality was perfectly acceptable for me, I am watching on a 1680 x 1050 resolution, streaming over a wireless connection. The purpose of the archive is to capture the results of the project and make the experiment results available to the public. Interestingly enough, they credit Flash, not Quick Time. I am confused.
The end product belongs to Creative Capital Foundation, one of the project sponsors. Following the path backwards, I found the Creative Capital Channel, which uses streaming media to present their digital, social commentary, work of arts. This one, Book of Roofs is actually a Flash driven "E-art", with files within files of discovery to be had. It was located under webcasts. (ummm, E-Art? never heard of it til now). A delightful angle on this site is the free, art box, to which you can store your favorite E-Art, to view at anytime, by logging in with your new assigned password. Nice spin on Favorites, eh? The purpose is an art exhibit, some of the art has been withdrawn and so does not load. But it is interesting.
See the exhibit, Letters from Homeroom. For this one you need both Flash and Quicktime. The whole is run with Flash and the substories "notes" are done in quicktime, both video and audio. I think this format could be successfully used on other types of sites, for story telling. I think they used the thumbnail, quicktime shorts for the visual appeal and to support the randomness of the highschool experience. Now, if all personal websites were this well put together, we would delight in wading through them.
ahhh, I read Chloe's post on MTV and I thought to myself, why, of course it is online! THE MTV! Just as everyone is plugged in these days to either stream something or the computer, WE were tied to MTV. Broadcast 24/7, we could not wait to watch the latest release of a music video. We were transfixed, transported, lost hours of sleep watching and listening. Bothered neighbors with noise (you could not listen to them with the sound turned down, could you?). I know, hard to believe mild-mannered Clark Kent was really Superman in her youth, but it is true.
I recall the hours we would spend discussing how we'd redesign these videos, tailor them to our preferences. That, my friend was in the early 1980's. Reality has become fact. I think the Buggles need to put out a new album, Streaming killed the Video Box (or Long Tail version: iTunes killed the radio star). Realize there were more sophisticated videos that this in the 1980's. They were applying a style familiar to "modern" Tv and movies of the 1950s and 1960s.
I realize I am already keeping my coursework separated (sorry Drew/Kathy). However, I think these two classes are proving to be complementary. Reading Kathy's assignment:
I found myself carrying these concepts forward when I read Chloe's blog and began looking for some of Landau's suggestions for creative use of movie/video/gaming digital media, were DRM not a barrier. Dancing With Myself-The Sims 2 fits the bill as does messing with the audio on R. Gere's Shall We Dance as shown in the previous blog.[ Landau, S., Stratulate, R., and Twilleager, D. (2006). Consumers, fans, and control: what the games industry can teach Hollywood about DRM. In Proceedings of the ACM workshop on Digital rights management, October 30, 2006, Alexandria, VA. Accessed 28 June 2007 from ACM Digital Library. ACM 159593555X/ 06/0010. ]
As these examples were not integrated directly into the site, are drawn from a site (youtube) that is all about shared stream products, they don't meet the needs of the assignment and I will endeavor to find a site that does. However, I thought the ah-hah and history recall worth the share.
Shall we dance? the "original":
...in my seemingly endless quest for understanding just where streaming begins and ends, I wandered to one of my favorite musicians sites; toriamos.com. The site appears to stream one of her songs on opening the page through flash player. Offered front and center (though small) is a speaker icon we have come to associate with sound on and off. Weirdly enough, when you click this, the sound does not shut off, it shows you a new tool bar giving you the full sound menu (off, rewind, forward, pause, restart). Now, were I someplace other than home, say WORK or SCHOOL, this would not be near fast enough to "kill" the sound. Anyhow, since the sound does not stop when you leave the page (as long as it is open) one must explore this option. 'Nuf said. Opportunity for more control here.
I figured since this is an up to date site and tori is all about showing herself, there would be video streaming onboard as well. Found some on the "News" page, under "click here" to watch live AOL performances (also on flash player). She has taken advantage of the "use existing web sites" to keep her page file size down. The live AOL performances are on spinner.aol.com/videos/sessions-live-performances/tori-amos. There are 10 pages, but only one music video listed here to be watched in it's entirety, along with a scroll down narrative you can read while listening. Page 8 had clips of her interview answer. Interesting integration with the text, allows you to skip to a question one might be more interested in. Since she is 40 something and her audience includes boomers, (as does AOL's) and is accessible to text readers, this integration increases useability,thus I would say it is a sound business use of streaming integration. (It took me completely away from the site though, which I consider a deficit.)
As commonly seen elsewhere, the spinner video is in a box in a corner with simple controls. Is this an example of "integrated" streaming? I don't think so, but am not sure. (Perhaps Master Drew can answer this question.) I watched this without my wireless breaking it up. (This may have something to do with my having switched back from hitchhiking on my neighbors wireless to my own, which gives me full bars. I will go visit V's again to see if I get a better stream this time...Yes, it is perfect now). I am viewing at 1680 x 1050 on a 22" LC screen and found the image quality just fine at the smaller size, but too pixilated at the larger option. Not sure how one tells what the "dimensions" of the streaming video are. As they all appear to be files stored elsewhere...is there software somewhere that does for stream videos what "web developer" does for web pages?
I expect the original intention of this design is to give you something more to do while watching the video, which since she is sitting at a piano requires a fraction of one's attention. It also leads you to more about tori and eventually the "buy" options, attempting to hook you in further. I'd add an album play list somewhere in the path or a download the itune for the song so one could impulse buy. Both the streamed song on her own site and the video on spinner were effective in getting the message across. And to think we had to watch MTV all night to "happen" on a music video like this 20 years ago!
[aside; i found this searching for the answer above: Encoding best practices for web video]
[aside 2: a quick and relatively cheap solution to educational broadcasting dilemma www.dvcproject.org]
this vox site caught my eye (posted on the front page of vox) due to it's topic name: how to make a messenger bag from plastic bags. The stream from you tube broke up a lot and i found that annoying and disruptive to following the thread. However, the editing was such that it was succinct, entertaining and followed the actual project flow which i think was key to it's success as an info stream...(does this catagory exist???). The flash of their website at the end was a bit too brief and i will have to watch it again to figure out where the pattern lies, but it was a pretty useful short short.
